James... I look forward to hearing from you on your experimenting! I thought we had tried about every scenario, but sounds like there are more. I am sure glad we have shared working folders going right now... I would hate to do something "dumb" 😉
All... we have sort of given up on having the working folder actually having a nice structure to it 😞 As I stated previously, you xref a dwg outside of the vault and the vault brings in a folder with the dwg. Of course this might act differently if one used the "attach dwg from vault" option as discussed in the blog above.
Currently we are setup with a yearly vault (say "2006). The working path is "P:\2006" (the shared project path). So when we create a project in C3D, it makes a path viewed in file explorer as "P:\2006\06356-Project Name". When we attach a dwg to the project however, we use the option in C3D of creating a subfolder. Currently we create a sub-folder called "vault". On the file explorer side of things, this folder path (working path) would be "P:\2006\06356-Project Name\Vault". This then is the location ALL data associated with vault will reside. Kind of a "hands off this area" sign if you see that path in file explorer. SO... when any dwg is attached to vault in a project, it would be placed into this "vault" subfolder or some subfolder of it (possibly a subfolder called "survey" and/or "construction plans").
In addition to the "vault" subfolder... we manually create another subfolder alongside it in file explorer. This will be for any project data not associated with vault. We call this simply "project data". SO... if you are going to look at a spreadsheet, drainage calcs, reports, etc via file explorer, one knows to go to the "P:\2006\06356-Project Name\Project Data" path. The advantage? General users dont have to know much more than "dont mess around with stuff in the "vault" folder... go to the "project data folder for stuff you need that does not reside in vault". Of course another good thing is the fact that all vault data is accessible via file explorer (for those users that really know what they are doing and for backup purposes). All the other benefits of the shared working folder previously discussed by others as well. The really nice thing... if you want to rearrange folders and files in the vault (using vault explorer)... when you are done, go to file explorer, delete the vault data in the "vault" subfolder and then use the "get folder contents" in vault. The working path immediately repopulates just how vault has it setup. With our rather simple file structure, we dont have to worry as much about vault files being scattered all over the place.
Of course I am tossing ideas into the wind to help others... and to hear other's ideas! Slowly, this thing is being revealed 😉 I do agree with some of you that there could stand to be some enhancements to this vault thing. To really make it work good, you need to understand a LOT of stuff that the average user will not want to or will not be feasibly able to understand. Thanks to all the ideas so far!
The wife is saying "are you going to come eat?!" so I better get off here.
Clem